Warning: spoilers for Marauders #16!
Jonathan Hickman’s time as “Head of X” at Marvel Comics has seen a huge reinvention of the X-Men titles, redefining Marvel’s mutants for the modern age. This development is no surprise for fans of Hickman’s earlier, ambitious work on Fantastic Four, SHIELD, and New Avengers, but nor is the reboot’s biggest flaw – one which Marvel Comics and the other writers working on Marvel’s mutants have clearly noticed.
Hickman’s grand, monologue-heavy style and preference for sprawling stories of kings and kingdoms tend to spend the vast majority of their time with male characters. The titular groups of New Avengers and SHIELD have almost no female members, and while projects like East of West showed some improvement in this area, it was disappointing to see Hickman’s House of X and Powers of X reinvent Moira MacTaggert only to make her mutantdom’s dirty secret, staffing Krakoa’s Quiet Council with big-name male heroes around whom the majority of the action revolves. While Hickman’s X-Men work does include more female characters than prior projects, the men tend to be the grand movers, and Marauders #16 takes pains to point this out.
Mauraders, from Gerry Duggan, Stefano Caselli, Matteo Lolli, and others, has focused on the adventures of Kate (formerly Kitty) Pryde, the Red Queen of the reborn Hellfire Trading Company, working alongside White Queen Emma Frost and Black King Sebastian Shaw. A practiced misogynist, Shaw has gone to great pains to seize control of Krakoa’s business interests from his female counterparts, going too far in previous issues when he murdered Kate, suspecting she could not be resurrected by the usual Krakoan protocols. Issue 16 sees Kate’s return, and an utterly staggering beat-down for Shaw, in which Storm, Kate, and Emma – the highest-ranking female mutants – torture and poison the villain, leaving him confined to a wheelchair (and lacking an eyeball) until such time as they allow his death and rebirth, with Kitty speculating, “Perhaps men are too emotional to lead,” as Shaw attempts to rescue the priceless bottle of whiskey she’s tossed into the fire.
The explicitly gendered beating echoes Emma’s sentiments from Marauders #7, in which she explained to new recruit Callisto that, “A new day has dawned. Their reign must be over.” When Callisto responds, “I know some decent humans,” Emma retorts, “I was referring to the males of both species. It’s our turn, darling.” It’s an exhilarating sentiment – and the book is a joy to read – but it’s hard not to read this as a broader critique of Hickman’s reboot so far. Of the female members of the Quiet Council, Jean Grey has been forced to step down, Storm is struggling with a deadly illness, and Mystique is being kept in check by Xavier and Magneto’s threats not to resurrect her wife; something they have no actual intent to do. Meanwhile, male members like Apocalypse and Magneto have acted as centerpieces for huge events like X of Swords and Empyre.
There are positives and negatives to the X-books’ current treatment of gender, but the fact that Marauders is the book currently addressing this imbalance outright – rather than the series as a whole allowing the women to drive more of the action – is an issue. The X-Men reboot has repositioned Marvel’s mutants as political giants whose concerns reach to the edges of time and space. Hickman’s books deal with heady ideas such as the religion of a nation without death, and the selfhood of mutants who can be reborn in different bodies with different powers, so the fact that its reckoning with gender is happening over in Marauders rather than as a wider concern is disappointing. Hopefully, Moira’s return will grant the series a female lead as momentously important as Xavier, Magneto, and Apocalypse, and the work being done away from the core titles can help correct the ship for Marvel’s upcoming Reign of X.
